


Thicker Than Water

by dingleberry (orphan_account)



Category: Nanatsu no Taizai, The Seven Deadly Sins (Manga)
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:16:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2321915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/dingleberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jericho dies a little and is reborn as something slightly different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thicker Than Water

The nights are the hardest part. You were sufficiently high ranking that they gave you your own little room to sleep in, stone-lined like all those in the fort, and windowless, for it lay somewhere underground. You lay in the bed with its rough blankets to guard against the autumn cold, and stare at the low, earthen ceiling. You haven't slept for the past three nights. The first, you were crying hot tears of shame. The second, you were contemplating the strange man Hendricksen's offer. The third, you were lying awake like tonight, kept conscious by the audible rush of alien blood through your veins.

It was worst last night, writhing and sweating beneath your blanket. Yesterday, they had let you stay in bed, for like all the New Generations you needed time for your humours to adjust to the new blood. All last night and day, your veins had raised above your skin, and burned as if some battle were being fought within. You couldn't help thinking of it as a divine punishment for your loss to that...that...

The scene had resurfaced in the stormy waters of your thoughts over and over again. Your pathetic, arrogant overconfidence, your even more pathetic high-heeled boots clicking on the dungeon's stone, your flashy, useless swordplay meant to kill the criminal, the traitor, the sin. Kill him? Ha!

He had looked back at you with laughing eyes, completely unscathed, as your knees knocked like a child's. You had been little more than a child when news of the Sins' betrayal reached your little town, and when, eventually, you were transferred to Baste to guard a member of the infamous knighthood, you had paid him no mind. You hadn't even known his name.

Well, you did now. The man who had dismissed you as little more than a barber, who had stolen your armor that he knew was too small for him, just to humiliate and expose you as a coward. Ban.

He was in your mind as you received the scroll from your superiors, detailing your immediate removal from Baste Dungeon, and your removal from the post of Holy Knight Apprentice in general, due to embarrassing defeat and lying about your identity. You knew what that really meant.

Well, what else could you do? There were no lady Holy Knights in your village, nor in Baste. Here, outside the capital, there were more. The tall girl with choppy, jet-black bangs and a white leotard who had led you to the cavern in the first place, for example. The other apprentice had introduced her as Geera. The other apprentice.

You remember him, the enormous man with the slick hair and thick mustache, who had been so confident. You remember being led by Geera's gentle hand down a stairway that seemed endless, into a dark, echoing space. Though the thick blindfold prevented you from seeing, you heard every drip of each monstrous stalactite, every metallic footstep of the others in the little party. And then, the rush of light as the blindfold was roughly removed. The towering red demon corpse, hunched over and chained to the wall (why? wasn't it dead?) the bottom portions of it illuminated by lit wall sconces, the rest shrouded in dancing shadows.

The crystalline chalice of steaming red blood, held trembling to your lips.

The memory of Ban, mocking you as you lay unclothed on the ground.

The ground rushing up to meet you as you fell, metallic taste in your mouth.

The screams of the other apprentice behind you.

The blood you hacked up onto the cavern floor.

The pain behind your eyes.

Geera.

Geera, figure clothed in white and swimming above you as your vision was clouded by blackness. Geera, seeming like an angel as she clutched your bloody chin and guided you up. Geera who carried you back to the fort.

Why? Why did she pick you up and dust you off, yet leave the remnants of the other apprentice to rot in that cavernous mouth without so much as a frown?

Because you were worthy. You were compatible.

Your eyes ache. You had seen them reflected in a pool on the cavern floor as you lay hunched over there. At that time, they had been a murky grey, the thin film of black lain over them like a sheer fabric. The last time you looked at your reflection in the stone washbasin, the blackness had solidified, and now looked uniform, like the eyes of all the other New Generations.

You become aware of an acute hunger, and remembered that you didn't eat yesterday. Someone had slid meals, on crude clay plates, in beneath the solid oak door. Oh. Right. You had felt too weak to move at first, had used your ability to slow time and watched the meal's painfully slow onslaught before rising, legs shaking, falling to the floor, crawling to the door and moving the previous meal out of the way. The mere sight of the food then had been enough to make you gag, and you had been sick earlier, you recalled. You had lain in bed all day in a fog of self-pity, fecund vomit crusted on your face. That's exactly what Gustav would expect, wouldn't he.

Well, no more. You try to roll off your bed and discover your limbs aren't paralyzed with pain as they were, just stiff. You stretch and stumble to the door and sit down heavily beside the three plates, which are lined up neatly in a row. You tear off a piece of the thick, dark bread, swab it through the cold soup and gulp it down without chewing. Your hunger pangs compel you to keep eating.

How did you use your ability yesterday? You had been expelled from the apprenticeship, and hadn't been permanently reinitiated under Hendricksen yet. Without a knighthood to amplify it, your power should be as weak as it was when you were a kid. But somehow it had come easily and naturally, the fabric of time twisting between your hands like a cat's cradle.

You move on to the second plate, the empty pit of your stomach still unsatisfied.

The blood had chosen you. Every night, you were kept up by hearing your body whirring with power, by seeing the blood softly glowing and pulsing beneath your skin. You were compatible.

Eventually, you crawl back into the bed and dream of red, red, red.


End file.
